Diane Keaton

If you’re interested in watching another studio comedy that tries very hard to make married sex appear really cool, therefore making it seem incredibly lame, Sex Tape hit theaters this weekend. For the rest of us, read on.

Sex-obsessed cinema is rampant in Hollywood, but few films actually capture the honesty, anticipation, and sometimes dark side of sexual experimentation. Here are ten films that feature characters who explore their sexuality and venture to brave new worlds.
… Read More

The film opens with simple, white-on-black titles, backed by an elegant, evocative jazz standard. The story that follows, framed by documentary-style straight-to-camera interviews, concerns a witty, urbane Jewish neurotic and his relationship with a sunny, fashionable shiksa. They stroll in through an autumnal Central Park and discuss death, sexual hang-ups, and New York real estate; the borough of Manhattan is captured in loving beauty shots, often backed by the music of Louie Armstrong. From that description, it would be easy to assume I was describing any number of Woody Allen films (Annie Hall in particular). But no, I’m talking about director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally… which hit theaters 25 years ago today and made a mint — its $92 million gross easily besting any Allen film to this day. So how did Harry do so well (big money, cultural capital, ongoing influence over the romantic comedy genre) when its clear inspiration remains such an acquired taste?
… Read More

Welcome to Flavorwire’s streaming movie guide, in which we help you sift through the scores of movies streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other services to find the best of the recently available, freshly relevant, or soon to expire. This week, there’s great stuff from George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones, Robert De Niro, Woody Allen, Aubrey Plaza, Diane Keaton, Billy Bob Thornton, Ray Liotta, John Cusack, Mia Farrow, Harvey Keitel, Sylvester Stallone, Jeff Bridges, Jake Johnson, and more. Check them out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now.
… Read More

When Freud wrote of female sexuality as “a dark continent,” he might as well have been writing about Woody Allen’s murky understanding of women. The director’s female characters invariably have abundant daddy issues, a slew of neuroses, and affairs with artists, professors, married men. They seek advice from therapists and fortune tellers, they’re tempestuous and stubborn; though they’re sometimes incredibly narrow, they’re often appealingly complex. Allen’s female characters are so obviously amalgamations of his fantasy woman – or rather women, plural – that one might contend they’re part of an ongoing, experiment in understanding women. Following this week’s news that Emma Stone is set to star in the next Allen film, we’ve conducted a little experiment of our own, looking back at the ladies of his canon, matching the women of his classic era with their contemporary counterparts.
… Read More

Welcome to Flavorwire’s streaming movie guide, in which we help you sift through the scores of movies streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and other services to find the best of the recently available, freshly relevant, or soon to expire. This week, we’ve got films from Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Michael Shannon, Anna Kendrick, Elisabeth Moss, Will Smith, and Martin Lawrence; check them out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now.
… Read More

Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful is out this Friday, in case you haven’t looked at a magazine or a television or the side of a bus recently, and while we know it’s a big-budget would-be Mouse blockbuster, attempting to replicate the astonishing (and frankly inexplicable) success of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland three years back, we still had to pick our jaws up off the floor when we got a look at its monster budget: $325 million in production and marketing costs. Yes, you read that right: 325. No extra numbers in there.
… Read More

A cry-face is like a snowflake; each one is a special and unique work of art. For that reason, ranking the effectiveness of cry-faces is harder than you’d think. We took a whack at the task, and are proud to present our top ten cry-faces in Hollywood, judged by believability, tear duct dexterity, and lip-quiver technique. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “cry-face,” it’s exactly what it sounds like — the face an actor makes when he or she cries, of course! Simple as that.) Check out our rankings after the jump, and hit the comments to let us know who would top your own list of oh-so-intense criers.
… Read More

A fascinating little movie that you not have heard of hit DVD and Blu-ray this week—its debut in either format. A New Leaf was the debut directorial effort of Elaine May, half of the comedy team Nichols and May (with Mike Nichols, who would go on to direct The Graduate, Silkwood, The Birdcage, and many others). She wrote, directed, and co-starred with Walter Matthau; a notorious perfectionist, she went over schedule on the picture, and when she finally turned it over to Paramount, it ran a full three hours. Studio head Robert Evans recut the film, softening its darkly comic tone and shortening it to 102 minutes. (It was an arbiter of things to come; though she had no difficulties with her second film, The Heartbreak Kid, she went over budget and over schedule on Micky & Nicky and the notorious boondoggle Ishtar, her final directorial effort to date.) May tried to both stop the film’s release and have her name removed, to no avail. It’s a pretty great movie, odd and funny, with peculiarly winning performances by May and Matthau; the disappointment is that the new video release has none of those deleted scenes, which studios frequently tossed or lost in the days before bonus features and director’s cuts.

Our longing for the original, extended cut of A New Leaf got us thinking about other films whose longer versions have either vanished or been suppressed. After the jump, we’ve gathered up what we know about ten of them; add your own in the comments, won’t you?
… Read More